This is a minimalist module that only slurps files into variables, nothing else.
use File::Slurper 'read_text';
my $contents = read_text($filename);
read_text()
takes two optional parameters to specify the file encoding and whether line endings should be translated between the unixish LF or DOSish CRLF standards:
my $contents = read_text($filename, 'UTF-8', 1);